Perfect Binding: A psychogeographic portrait of counter-cultural Leicester from the late 50s to the early 70s
//The premises of Jack English Snr’s lighting shop in Leicester’s Granby Street provide the book’s cover image//
//Will English (right) with Helen Robinson and Steph Raynor in a transport cafe c.1970. Photo by Rose Kendall//
//David Parkinson and his Messerschmitt bubble car, 1974. Photography: Will English//
Perfect Binding, the recently published book by British experimental filmmaker/broadcaster/bookseller William English, is a psychogeographic portrait of a particular strain of cultural activity in a particular place at a particular time: the Midlands city of Leicester from the 1950s to the 70s.
//Waitress Cecilia Green and Maurice Coleman performing at the Chameleon, undated//
//Jim Mellors in a local report on his murals for the Leicester rendezvous The Cauldron in 1965; Victoria Ashley – as Mellors became – in a rubber gown//
Leicester is English’s hometown, and he grew up in an art- and style-obsessed milieu which included the late fashion photographer David Parkinson, Steph Raynor, the founder of directional King’s Road boutiques Acme Attractions and Boy, and Helen Robinson, who opened the Covent Garden clothing store PX wth Raynor in the late 70s. Will English’s older brother is the photographer Jack, and Will has also made a name for himself in the field, notably with his strange and unsettling 1975 portraits of Vivienne Westwood in Sex, the Chelsea outlet she ran with another of English’s confreres, Malcolm McLaren.
//Photobooth portrait of Steph Raynor 1965 and with a mannequin by Will English around 1970//
//Left: Montage comprising a 1948 black and white image of Jack English’s lighting shop with a colour photo of the same premises 70 years later; right: montage of 2018 b&w of the premises as a tattoo parlour with a colour image from 1968 when it was a hat shop//
//Left: The English family home in Kirby Muxloe in 1956; right: English’s parents at a fancy dress party the same year, his father in lederhosen and mother as one of the two Minnie Mouses (Mice?)//
With adventurously presented memorabilia, ephemera and research from the archives of local newspapers, Perfect Binding is also an affecting autobiography in which English dwells on his complicated and sometimes fraught family relationships, in particular with father Jack Snr, who ran a lighting shop in the city centre before moving the family to the neighbouring village Kirby Muxloe, and his Dutch mother Jansje Schoen.
//Left: Cuttings and ads from the Leicester Evening Mail with (right) writer Ray Gosling’s 1961 Young Fabian booklet on the morals and behaviour of teenagers//
//Right: 1956 portrait of the Chameleon proprietor Peter Josephs by Peter Millichip with promotional and other materials for the coffee bar//
Presented as a series of acutely-recalled memories and in interviews with such central figures as English’s brother Jack, Raynor and the late Victoria Ashley, who made the local news in the 60s as the artist Jim Mellors, Perfect Binding pinpoints the growth of the city’s jazz, beat, mod and rock scenes and marks such hotspots as the Chameleon coffee house and the Cameo cinema as well as the short-lived counter-cultural journal Crescent.
Will English moved to London and, with his partner Sandra Cross, in 1980 established the ahead-of-its-time organic vegetarian restaurant The Dining Room in Borough Market.
Tomorrow Cross and English are staging What Did You Eat Today? – an event which investigates how much we reveal about ourselves when asked about food. This will present three films on the subject featuring artist Bill Burns and inventors Hugh de la Cruz and Captain Maurice Seddon.
A couple of years back, English captured Seddon’s unique presence on a vinyl LP compiling recordings of his telephone conversations. Apparently, Seddon operated a homemade device which enabled him, by use of a foot pedal, to allow only one person to speak at a time. This could doubtless be infuriating, but the singular nature of Seddon’s mind was revealed in the archive of tapes he kept. “A conversation with Maurice could last several hours and might include a history of Gordonstoun School, the benefits of eating raw garlic or a reasoned justification for keeping a pack of dogs,” writes English in the liner notes to the album, which was released on Paradigm Discs in 2018.
Perfect Binding is limited to an edition of 300; The Seddon Tapes Vol 1 to 500. Find out more from williamenglish.com
What Did You Eat Today? is at Wygstan’s House in Leicester, starting at 7.30pm. Entry is free.